Jake Hall’s journey through chaos, colour and creation.

Jake says he is in a constant state of “becoming” an artist. What fuels him is never a need to claim that word as a title, only a desire to have a pure means of expression. Each painting is its own story. “It’s a lot of pain, and a lot of good, and a lot of hope. I’ve managed to get them out of my mind and put them on a bit of paper.” What makes this perfect is that in his hesitation to define that as artistry, he has landed in the hands of true artistry; in seeking self-expression above all else.

He describes how his pathway into art was as unconventional as it was personal, and that despite having many creative moments in his youth, one situation changed everything – waking in a hospital bed after being stabbed. “I nearly ended up in a box. I had a deeply spiritual experience where I had to deal with the big man upstairs. And I said I’d create. And I’d change my life around to create. I would use all that pain from over the years and I would deal with this stuff. It saved my life at the start. It was literally a lifesaver for me.”

The painting didn’t come straight away. Jake started with music and fashion. After the birth of his daughter, River, he had more drive than ever to create his own fashion line. He speaks of a twinset tracksuit they made, to give boys from his local area the option of “smarting it up” in casual wear, but it was all coming at a cost, emotionally and financially. “It nearly ruined me because I was doing it out of my own garage.” The hurdles only spurred him on. He dons a wry smile when he says: “It was quite funny. GQ put me on a list of the 10 worst-dressed people in England. I was one below Boris Johnson.”

“There’s an element of me that uses that kind of thing as fuel. I always kept that article and said, I’ll come back and I’ll show you. These negative things can sometimes be our biggest blessings because we can then go out and go, let’s go get it. You might have just been sitting still before if you didn’t have that knockdown.”

So, between fashion, business, and music, where did painting come into the picture?

“The first thing that drew me to painting was my daughter. I went through a tough, tough experience losing that business that I had built for seven years from my own garage. I had put my heart and soul into something and, one day, it got taken away from me. I was constantly waking up in the night, I couldn’t sleep and then, one day, we moved to Spain and my daughter said to me, “Daddy, let’s draw.” It took me out of that zone, that dark place. My daughter took me out of that place by simply doodling and drawing.”

Jake speaks fondly of his daughter and of wanting to give her opportunities that weren’t there for him as a kid. “She’s the key inspiration for everything,” he beams. Fatherhood has reminded him that in his own childhood, he was constantly being told to conform, behave, and limit himself. “I want my daughter to look at this all and have her own inspiration, her own view. She can look at those limits and see that they aren’t really there.”

“When I look back at my journey, sometimes I think, why am I a bit different? And it was because of the hell that I was in at school.”

Brought up in East London in the 90s, the education system was not an encouraging place for someone like Jake. “I was heavily dyslexic at school. Schools are militant with academic education, they don’t encourage you to be creative.”

“I feel for kids who are labelled as naughty – because a ‘naughty’ kid at school was me. I used to do anything to get chucked out of class because I couldn’t stand doing writing and maths all day. I just didn’t get it. I was getting in a lot of trouble from being a naughty kid, but I liked it. I just thought, it’s far better to actually be liked at school, even if it’s for a reason other than being a ‘good’ boy. Because I couldn’t be that. Because you didn’t let me be that. But if someone had just given me a pen and paper, I could have drawn. If I’d been encouraged more at school from the creative side, I could have been a completely different person. I think a lot of people around me who come from where I’m from would laugh that I’m doing art.”

As luck would have it, East London wasn’t Jake’s only childhood haunt. At the age of six, he moved to Mallorca with his family, a place he remembers being full of natural beauty, space to play, and new opportunities. “I think that’s why I use a lot of off-whites and pastel colours – because it reminds me of the colours that I’d see in Spain, like the sky, baby blue. That’s where there were happy times growing up. ”

“We lived on anchor out at sea off the coast of Formantera for a year and a bit. You could only get the dinghy back to shore. It was my dad’s idea. Him and my mum, they didn’t know it but they were proper creatives. Going from the rag trade from market stalls along Roman Road to then moving to Formantera – not many people did that from the East End. It must be in me somewhere.”

“It really opened up my mind. I got to meet different types of people, people who took me to see boats and all these nice things I’d never seen before, and between that and the East London hustle it gave me that balance of drive and belief that I could do anything. Coming from nothing – to then seeing everything.”

After a lifetime of being told he would never amount to anything, Jake decided to become everything. Painter, photographer, designer, musician, entrepreneur, director, are not categories which resonate with Jake. “Fashion, music, and art is all one thing – I’m a creator.”

“Everything that I do is led around – truly and honestly – that little version of me that got told that he couldn’t do things, that got told “you’ll never be nothing.” I think my legacy would be: if he could do it, why can’t I?”